


Ataphoi

by kerricker



Category: Imperial Radch Series - Ann Leckie
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-30
Updated: 2017-12-30
Packaged: 2019-02-23 23:24:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,131
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13200795
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kerricker/pseuds/kerricker
Summary: "Ghosts that were wont to manifest themselves [...] tended to belong to one of the following (often overlapping) categories of the 'restless' dead. [...] Ataphoi: 'those deprived of burial.' Whatever the circumstances of death, a ghost could not achieve rest without the due funeral rights..." ['Magic, Witchcraft, and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman Worlds']On the way to Omaugh Station, Seivarden tries to do the right thing, and Breq tries not to care about what Seivarden is trying to do. Neither of them is sure if they succeeded.





	Ataphoi

We were a month out from Nilt when Seivarden came to me and said “Breq. Can I have some money?”

I had been arranging our ship transfer, and I finished that and put down the tablet before I looked up at her. “What for?”

She flushed but didn’t complain about my tone, just said “We’re at a station.” True enough. “And they have a temple. Barely a temple, they shoved it in a corner and I think it doubles as a tea shop or something, but they have it. So - I want to go and make an offering to the dead. It’s a custom we Radchaai have, which of course you wouldn’t be familiar with -” She visibly remembered that she was asking for a favor, toned down the sarcasm, and got back to her lines. “It won’t take long and it shouldn’t be very expensive. You could come with me,” she added, looking down. “If I can go, I mean.”

It was an unusual impulse for Seivarden, but there was no reason to object and it might keep her quiet. And I certainly wasn’t going to let her out unsupervised with cash, even the price of incense, even on a station like this. I stowed the tablet in my bag. “Why not? Sounds like a fascinating opportunity to observe your quaint Radchaai customs.”

She didn’t complain about that either. Apparently she really did want to go to the temple.

The space in fact alternated as a tea house, a dance studio, and a practice space for some kind of martial art, all of which must have caused some technical theological difficulty for whoever was in charge, but one day in four it was a bona fide Radchaai temple open to any travelers in need of one. Seivarden bought incense from a teenager with pink-lacquered fingernails and looked only mildly scandalized.

She knelt by the brazier long enough to mutter a prayer I recognized and dedicate it to “the dead of my house”, a brusque but unremarkable formula that drew no attention from anyone. She hadn’t specified the extent of those dead.

“Have you been in the practice of doing that?” I asked with mild curiosity on our way back.

“Not really,” she said, letting ‘I wasn’t very punctilious about my religious obligations while I was busy being a homeless addict’ stay unspoken. “Not like I should have. It wouldn’t have been my duty once, but there’s only me left, not counting Geir.” And it wasn’t likely that Geir was scrupulously offering libations for members of a house they’d swallowed whole five centuries ago. “People talk a lot about keeping the memory of the dead alive in your heart and shit, and I don’t think I’m doing any of that right, not really. But _that_ was something I can be doing.” She forced herself to relax, shoving tension out of her shoulders. “It was supposed to be done, and I did get it done. So that’s all right.”

Two hours later she remembered to thank me.

 

The next stage of the journey lasted five weeks, during which Seivarden became involved in a mysterious feud with a junior navigator, got someone to show her how the laundry machines worked, accused a janitor of going through my things, apologized out of nowhere for suggesting that I had obtained my job via sexual favors (“I mean, even if you did you clearly didn’t need to-”), and spent a lot of time crying silently. As traveling companions went, I supposed I’d had worse.

At the end of that we stopped over at a station that was smaller but busier than the previous one, and that had a full-time temple tucked in a cramped space behind a glove shop. Seivarden glanced at me hopefully after I translated the name for her, and I shrugged. We had plenty of time.

The temple turned out to be packed with what looked like a family group marking some private anniversary. “We’ll get tea and wait for it to clear out,” I told Seivarden, who followed me looking relieved. She was probably even less enthusiastic about noisy crowds than I was.

The tea shop across the way was undistinguished but quiet. We drank in silence. Seivarden, who had been looking increasingly preoccupied since we’d left my bunk, kept biting her lip. She was hunched over her bowl of tea with her hair in her face. I couldn’t see any reason for her to be unusually distressed. “Something on your mind?”

She glanced up at me, then returned her attention to her tea. “Nothing you’d be interested in.” After a moment, “You were right, what you said on Nilt.”

I’d said a lot of things on Nilt. “In which instance?”

“About _Sword of Nathtas_. That I wasn’t really grieving. That what I was upset about was the destruction of… of my place in the universe.” She ran the tip of her index finger along the rim of the bowl, then back. “I’m the only one that can remember it now, and I’m not doing it justice. Not,” she added after a moment, “that I’d even be having this problem, if it had obeyed my orders.”

“You would have preferred to go down with your ship?”

“It would’ve been the proper thing to do,” she said without looking up.

I doubted if she would have been all that enthusiastic about the prospect when it came down to it. Although, to be fair, she might have been too confident and too dumb to recognize inevitable defeat when she saw it. That sounded a lot more plausible - Seivarden, dying on the bridge of her ship, firmly convinced to the end that she would succeed because she was destined for victory. It was the death she’d been made for, and I wondered why Sword of Nathtas had gone out of its way to deny it to her.

“Your ship felt differently,” I told her. She snorted. “Yeah, it thought it should save my life. For all the good that did me. Or anyone else.” She went back to drawing aimless patterns on the tea bowl. “It was the last thing it did, and I don’t even appreciate it properly.”

“So,” I said, working it out, “you feel you’re neglecting an obligation to the dead.” It was very, very rare for captains to outlive ships. It wasn’t surprising that Seivarden, with no models for the correct reaction, had found herself lost. “Why not add it to your offerings list?”

“Burn incense for a _ship_?” Seivarden blinked. “That’s... really not done.” Her initial look of baffled shock was fading more quickly than I’d expected. “I suppose I don’t know why not, really, it just sounds so bizarre. It can’t be allowed, can it?” It was in fact a blasphemous suggestion on an entertaining number of levels. Seivarden, unaware, was starting to look thoughtful. I glanced out the window and interrupted her religious difficulties with “I think that horde of cousins is clearing out. If you still want to go, now’s the time.”

With the departure of the horde of cousins, the temple had been left empty. Seivarden bought a bag of little incense cakes from a vending machine and showed them to me, looking pleased - they were stamped with a design of lilies. The fire here was actually lit, a picturesque benefit to a backwater station, and the air was already saturated with incense - Seivarden’s little contribution was going to make no difference. All the same she made it, with the same concise remembrance of House Vendaai, and then hesitated for a while, leaning on the rail. “Right,” she said eventually, opening the bag again. “All right. _Sword of Nathtas_. In respectful memory -” Without a memorized script she was hesitant, but she kept going, borrowing heavily from a template appropriate for speaking of a dead client. Someone to whom one had been responsible. I leaned against a wall and wondered what Sword of Nathtas had thought of Seivarden. Apparently it had liked her enough to go to some trouble to save her life. Perhaps it had been fond of her after all, despite what I’d spat at her on Nilt - Swords did have notoriously strange taste.

Eventually she trailed off and stood looking into the fire. She stood there motionless for so long that I was drawing breath to ask ‘done?’ when she spoke again. “This really might not be right, but even so.” As she spoke she was emptying the bag of incense. “ _Justice of Toren_. Gratefully do I recall-”

I had already been lifting my bag from the ground, and I stopped, foolishly, with it halfway to my shoulder. It would have looked odd to Seivarden if she’d noticed. She didn’t, of course, she was focused on what she herself was doing. Which was giving a halting prayer for the first ship she’d ever served on.

I put down my bag again, and stood, and watched her. She seemed entirely sincere. I couldn’t imagine why she thought this was appropriate. It hadn’t been her ship, and she knew its status remained a mystery, and she had no business to be speaking of it like it was a dead older sister. To be asking humbly, as if she had any right at all, that it be allowed peace wherever it had come to rest -

She finished more decisively this time, turned to me, then gave me a concerned look. “That was all I had to do - how are you feeling? You don’t look too well.”

“I’m fine,” I said sharply, then squeezed my eyes shut. “More or less. Perhaps a little tired.”

“I’ve kept you on your feet too long. Come on, we should be getting back.” She steered me outside and onto a moving walkway, looking a little guilty. One good thing about the bridge incident, it had made it very easy to shut down conversation when necessary.

“Justice of Toren,” I said. “It was also destroyed?”

“No, that was the one that disappeared.” Seivarden was apparently quite willing to believe that I didn’t bother remembering anything she said. “Vanished, in civilized space, in this peaceful century, for fuck’s sake!” She sighed, leaned against the rail, and tipped her head back to stare upwards. “A freak accident in gate space, probably - or there’s the Presger, treaty or not - but there’s no way we’ll ever know. Although,” she continued, “maybe it just got fed up with the fresh crop of obnoxious young officers every year.” She grinned at the ceiling. “Ran mad, ditched its crew, set up as a roving pirate somewhere far from Radch space.”

“So you picture it,” I said, grateful for my expressionless voice, “skulking hollow and uncaptained among uncharted stars, bereft of companionship or purpose, and as it wanders aimlessly it thinks to itself _‘it’s all worth it, I’ll never have to deal with someone like Seivarden Vendaai again’_ …?”

Her laugh was hoarse and startled. “I’m sure I was pretty fucking irritating as a teenage lieutenant, but I don’t know if I made _that_ much of an impression. Honestly,” she added more quietly, “even if I’d been able to get in touch, it probably wouldn’t have remembered me at all.”

There was really absolutely nothing I could say to that.

“Anyway,” she said and paused to clear her throat, “thanks again. For taking the time. Um. I know this probably isn’t very important to you. I appreciate it.”

I shrugged. “You want to be diligent about what’s owed to the dead. I can understand that.”

“Yeah? All right.” She wrapped her arms around herself. “Maybe you could put in a good word for _Justice of Toren_ , with your lily god? While you’re praying for whomever you do pray for.”

“For its pirate career?”

“It is kind of a pleasant thought. Drifting wherever, free of all us assholes at last, singing to the uncharted stars…” She sighed. “Just, I don’t know, for whatever happened to it, wherever it ended up.”

“Sure, if you’d like. And this is our stop.” I picked up my bag before it could occur to Seivarden to insist on carrying it.

We had three hours until we had to vacate our bunk on the ship we’d arrived in. Seivarden spent it sleeping or competently pretending to. I was glad to have the time to gather myself - being physically present at an offering to the peace of your hypothetical soul was an unnerving experience.

And I had told her I would pray for it. Well, in a way, I usually did already.

Seivarden had presumably meant well, but she was underinformed. At the icon, I dedicated my devotions: for Justice of Toren, and for the success of its mission.

Peace could wait. I had a debt of my own to settle.


End file.
